What People Don't Understand About Spiritual Formation
In every generation of the church, there is a temptation to change language without changing one’s overarching commitments or understanding. For instance, I have often seen people go from talking about mentoring, to discipleship, to coaching, to spiritual direction, without changing what they do in the slightest.
One of problems, if I can put it that way, of spiritual formation becoming mainstream, is that this is often what is happening.
I often hear folks talking about “doing spiritual formation,” when they are only talking about doing something devotional. So if they are running an event of some kind, and they claim it is a “spiritual formation event,” often that only means that there is a devotional component tacked-on to the side of it.
Similarly, I often see the same thing happen with “self-care.” In this sense, there is a generically therapeutic component to an event and the claim is that, because of this, the event is now about self-care. Leaving aside this language (I don’t love the language of self-care, but I get what folks are pointing at with it), I think it is important to highlight this issue with spiritual formation particularly.
Therefore, when we say something like “we are doing spiritual formation,” we have to distinguish between two things. On the one hand, everything we do as Christians is a part of our spiritual formation (or at least can be). The problem with saying this, however, is that it is not true mechanistically. You can run a beautiful event, hold a retreat, do a Bible study, etc., and it have nothing to do with someone’s spiritual formation. Our formation is not something we achieve by enacting certain practices (even if all forms of spiritual formation will include these).
It turns out that we can do a retreat, participate in a Bible study, or enact beautiful liturgies in body only and not in heart. We have it in our capacity to do these things in the flesh. This means that we are going to need to be shepherding folks in and through the various teachings, practices, and activities we lead them into, not assuming that the activities themselves are somehow “pre-baptized” for growth. Too often we imagine that events are performative activities, and that as long as we perform well enough then spiritual formation will “happen.”
To claim that we are “doing spiritual formation,” therefore, I think we need to be more clear about what we are talking about. Will we be doing things like Bible study, prayer, retreat, etc.? I hope so! But we also need to be naming the developmental processes of growth for folks as we shepherd them to the Lord.
This is the second major feature of spiritual formation we need to attend to. Any articulation of spiritual formation, and any teaching we do for the sake of spiritual formation needs to attend to the developmental maturation of a Christian. This means that we have to have wrestle with how God matures a life and what it means to grow increasingly into the likeness of Jesus.
This is why I think the focus on spiritual practices has been misguided (at least in part). We need to talk about spiritual practices to be sure. But when we lead with spiritual practices, people inevitably locate these practices within a preconceived framework of generic formation. Whatever they image to be “maturation” is now governing and guiding their use of spiritual practices.
Once we get into the developmental maturation, what we often simply call “sanctification,” we must make sure we are doing so in and through the wisdom that only God provides. Wisdom requires more from us than just holding events, teaching classes, or enacting disciplines, even as it requires us to engage these sorts of things. But wisdom requires us to see that it is only through losing our lives that we find them, that only in our weakness can we find God’s strength, and that the experience of God’s presence is often against what we expect.
When we shift our lives into the mode of wisdom, we can now begin to understand Willard’s notion of the “kingdom of God as realism.” This claim gets to the idea that Jesus was a sort of tour-guide, showing us around his kingdom and therefore naming how the world actually works. Our eyes won’t give us this wisdom. But as we come to have our minds and hearts shaped around the contours of the crucified Lord of glory - as we come to have hearts shaped by the kingdom - we begin to understand Paul’s claim in 1 Corinthians 2:14-16:
“The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. ‘For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”
One can enact spiritual disciplines as a mode of “self-made religion” Paul tells us, that is a commonsensical way to approach growth, but has no “value in stopping the indulgences of the flesh” (Col. 2:23).
This is why spiritual formation is always more than simply a strategy of growth, or a series of spiritual practices, but is an entire theology of life with God, in Christ, by the Spirit to be shaped increasingly in Christ’s likeness. Spiritual formation requires wisdom and love to be the framing features of our considerations as we attend to the full-range of life in Christ. Spiritual formation is not a tack-on belief about growth, but is an entire life in the presence of the holy God.
Spiritual formation in wisdom and love calls us to something deeper than spiritual practices. Spiritual formation is about having the “mind of Christ,” so that we are transformed increasingly according to the contours of his life.
This is what calls us into the care and direction of souls, that great and rich tradition of shepherding. But, as the Christian tradition always emphasized, this requires a wisdom from above and not simply common sense visions of growth. This vision of life with God calls for soul care.
In light of this, check out our training programs in spiritual formation and soul care here. The church is in desperate need of folks who will shepherd others more deeply into the intimacy of life with Christ. Let’s re-emphasize this call of wisdom and love.
For more on all of this, here is the first season of my podcast: Spiritual Formation: An Invitation to Drawing Near:
On Spotify click here.
For Apple Podcasts click here.
For YouTube (audio only) click here.
Thank you for this, Kyle. The statement that stood out was,
"This is why spiritual formation is always more than simply a strategy of growth, or a series of spiritual practices, but is an entire theology of life with God, in Christ, by the Spirit to be shaped increasingly in Christ’s likeness."
Equating spiritual formation with spiritual disciplines eventually led me to resign to defeat about the possibility of deep change. Yet, I barely noticed what had happened. Willard's Renovation of the Heart and your articles here have greatly helped.
Oh. And if I were reading my reply which says I find it coherent but also says it lacks grounding, that would be confusing to me. Its coherence is, I think, intuitive. I have an intitutive sense that it aligns coherently with how I understand the biblical story. But I'd love to see made explicit what intuitively resonates and lands as coherent.